Real Australians didn’t live in flats in the 1940s. My family did because we were leftwing intellectuals averse to suburbia.  But almost all the other residents of the six flats comprising ‘Wanda Court’ (on the unfashionable edge of fashionable Toorak in Melbourne’s south-east) were Jewish refugees newly arrived from Europe. This was the case in many blocks of flats in Melbourne at the time, when the centre of gravity of the Jewish community was definitively shifting from Carlton (lodging houses) to St Kilda and the eastern suburbs (small blocks of flats). In this paper, based on oral histories as well as my own memory and municipal and electoral records, I trace the different paths by which Wanda Court’s residents arrived in Australia, their connections in Melbourne, and the uneasy multilingual relations that evolved in the flats themselves.